A group of motherboard enthusiasts working for GIGABYTE, sharing their insider knowledge and general ramblings of the motherboard business, the tech industry, latest technologies and trends, and other random odds and ends.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Maximum PC builds a Dream Machine 2011 around GIGABYTE Z68X-UD7

Each year Maximum PC set out to the build the ultimate PC, one that will send gamers, geeks and DIY builders in paroxysms of joy and envy. They call it the Dream Machine. This year’s build is particularly noteworthy from our perspective in that it’s based around our GA-Z68X-UD7 board. With a water cooled and overclocked Intel i7 2600K pushed to 4.8GHz, three GTX 580 cards in a tri-SLI configuration, 16GB of RAM, 2x Vertex3 SSDs in a RAID 0 array with 9TBs of storage – yeah, you can see why the call it the Dream Machine. It also makes sense that they’d also opt for our top tier Sandy Bridge board:

The board itself has everything we need….a crap load of SATA connectors, USB 3.0 internal headers; and not just SLI and CrossFire X, but also tri-SLI. To run (tri-) SLI, we needed a motherboard that features Nvidia’s nForce 200 chip. The GA-Z68-UD7-B3 has that and is also chock full of cool features such as the ability to charge your phone via USB while your PC is off.

Pick up the latest edition of Maximum PC for a complete run down of the Dream Machine 2011.